Pleasure gardens: The term sounds dreamy and enchanting.
And for 18th and 19th century city residents, these gardens definitely were: recreational spaces open day and night that featured landscaped grounds, lights, music, theater, fountains, and grottos.
Kind of a cross between a botanical garden, country club, and the Playboy mansion, pleasure gardens offered a coed social scene plus the latest fancy refreshments—the alcoholic kind as well as the new craze: ice cream.
New York Vauxhall Gardens, opened in 1767 on Greenwich Street by the Hudson River, was one of the first. Vauxhall eventually relocated between Broadway and the Bowery (practically the countryside at the time) in 1805.
Exclusive Niblo’s Garden (at left) soon became hugely popular, taking over an older pleasure garden at Broadway and Prince Street in 1825 and expanding it with a theater and open-air saloon.
Contoit’s Garden, close to Niblo’s on Broadway, was an elegant rival. And one of the last pleasure gardens to open, in 1858, was the Palace Garden (top), on the northwest corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue.
The pleasure gardens were gone by 1900. Blame the newly opened Central Park, cheap transportation to seashores like Brighton Beach, and more adrenaline-pumping diversions, like the Coney Island amusement parks.
Ice cream, whale-oil illumination, and a breezy promenade through a landscaped pasture just couldn’t compare to the razzle dazzle of Coney.
Tags: 18th century New York, 19th century New York, Contoit's Garden, New York Pleasure Gardens, Niblo's Broadway and Prince, Niblo's Garden, Palace Garden, Pleasure gardens, Sixth Avenue and 14th Street, Vauxhall Gardens
Ephemeral New York 
May 4, 2011 at 5:03 am |
I take it that the Minsky’s National Winter Garden on Houston, that closed in 1931, doesn’t qualify?
May 4, 2011 at 11:51 am |
Wasn’t Minksy’s a burlesque house? I don’t think it had any gardens to speak of, just a theater.
May 4, 2011 at 9:54 am |
Perhaps Tompkins Square Park in the East Village was designed as one? Still standing from Avenue A to B and 7th St to 10th St, certainly more then big enough to be a ‘pleasure garden’.
May 4, 2011 at 12:12 pm |
As much as I dislike what Mike Bloomberg has done to the city in the name of “progress” I have to admire his administrations efforts to increase the amount of public space and parkland along the Manhattan and now the Brooklyn waterfronts. From the West Side (Hudson River Park) to the East Side there are lawns, wild flower plantings and plenty of benches and assorted seating for various pleasures in these modern “Pleasure Gardens”. Of course Mike Bloombergs nanny government refuses to allow us the pleasures of LEGAL products such as alcoholic beverages and tobacco products. All that aside these improvements to public space are a laudable achievement.
May 4, 2011 at 10:08 pm |
Consulting Burrows and Wallace’s Gotham, other pleasure gardens:
May 6, 2011 at 6:31 pm |
Might be interested in more on early pleasure gardens in New York City – http://bit.ly/kidKAi
November 19, 2012 at 5:23 am |
[…] visited alms houses and lunatic asylums, checked out the infamous Tombs prison and amusement garden Niblo’s, and hung out at a dance hall called Almack’s popular with the city’s black […]
January 26, 2013 at 2:37 am |
Reblogged this on Big Apple Dayze.
January 9, 2014 at 8:20 am |
[…] all super-aware city kids, she knows all the leading attractions. She visits Vauxhall Gardens, mentions a wax figure at Barnum’s Museum, and remembers how moved her father was when he saw […]
August 10, 2015 at 3:23 am |
[…] Universelle in Paris. A theatrical agent arranged for her to come to New York, making her debut at Niblo’s Garden on Prince Street later that […]
June 26, 2017 at 7:49 am |
[…] they didn’t cool off at one of the city’s lovely pleasure gardens, they may have gone to Dandy Point—a popular East River recreation spot at today’s East […]